Race-Baiting Mississippi Senate Runoff to Help Thad Cochran

The fact is that we don’t need election observers to detect if Democrats are raiding the Republican runoff. Public information will likely provide the answers in time.

A voter’s history is public record. A few clicks of a mouse can give anyone the names of every Mississippi voter who voted only in Democrat primaries and then magically showed up this Tuesday, presumably to vote for Thad Cochran. The database of voters can be managed to develop lists of names of voters who voted in 3, 6, 12, 20, whatever, straight Democrat primaries before voting in the Republican runoff on Tuesday.

While that might not be acceptable evidence in the halls of academia to show that Democrats illegally voted in the Republican runoff, to anyone with common sense, it provides a pretty good indication about what was happening.

Nobody needs election observers to obtain information that a computer can provide. That inconvenient fact undermines the desperate efforts to smear fine folks who care about following the law. Lawlessness might be in vogue in some parts of the country, but in Mississippi, the rule of law is still respected.

Which brings us back to the academics trying to conjure Mississippi’s ghosts from the summer of 1964. Notice the rhetorical trick by Professor Matthew Steffey in the New York Times. He tells the New York Times, “Some folks think this is not really about legal challenges to individual ballots, but about dissuading or in some cases intimidating voters.”

Some folks? Which folks? Why didn’t he say? Why didn’t the New York Times interview those “folks”?

Unattributed hearsay is now driving national political stories at the New York Times. Never mind the pesky burden of attribution from a paper trying to stoke racial tensions. Hearsay from a law professor will do just fine.

This is the way the left mobilizes the race base. Vague threats, sinister plots, the resurrection of Jim Crow from the dead, lies – these are the tools the left and academics use to help elected politicians who better suit their worldview. We’ll see if it works on Tuesday.